1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of federated computing systems and more particularly to firmware updating computer systems within a federated architecture.
2. Description of the Related Art
A federated system is a collection of independent, cooperative, possibly heterogeneous and autonomous computer systems which allows sharing all or some of its data. The term “multi-enclosure system” or the term “multiple enclosure system” is more descriptive of the physical predominance in a federated computing environment in which physically separate computers are linked together as one system where each of the computers enjoys its own external casing or enclosure and each computer is coupled to another through a configured communicative linkage over which coordinative actions can occur with respect to all of the computers in the federated system.
Federated systems address the popular requirement of cooperation between independent computing systems in order to share data and provide new functionalities to the users. In this regard, a federated system coordinates the cooperation between different computers to provide a unified view of those computers to different users. Three properties characterize a federated computing system: distribution in that data and processing are distributed across different computing systems, autonomy in that each computing system operates independently at a cooperative level chosen by each computing system, and heterogeneity in that there can be different types of computing systems federated within the federated computing system.
In federated computing systems, multiple firmware images, specifically one image per computer, must coordinate the initial sequencing of the federated computing system. In order to properly coordinate this sequencing, the computers of the federated computing system must share matching sets of firmware. This firmware is therefore considered critical to the successful initialization of a federated system. A common problem occurs when flash updating firmware on different computers of a federated computing system. In this regard, when a particular computing system fails to update with its peers, the result is a computer system that will no longer initialize in its federated configuration. Presently, the end user will be alerted in most cases to this failure, however, to avoid such a circumstance, an external management controller or end user must interact with each of the computing systems to resolve proper firmware levels to be applied to each computer system in the federated system.